Thursday, August 3, 2017

I am a sucker for a good "life and times" biography -
the kind of book that uses a single life to give focus to what is really an
interpretation of a complex chapter in history. This is a great example of this
approach. Redding was an undeniably great singer whose impact was
undeniably limited by his early death. However, Gould uses that short
life as the center of a cultural history of the civil rights movement.
Redding's career begins in a pre-teen gospel quartet at approximately the
same time as Brown v Board of Ed and he dies a
month before Martin Luther King is assassinated.His career is built from the tenuous and
challenging relationships he forms with white managers, recording executives and
session musicians as well as his determination to forge his place among the
soul and R&B musicians he considers his heroes.

Gould is a fine writer and in this volume we get histories of the
careers of Ray Charles, Little Richard, Aretha Franklin and scores of
others.He is able to place myriad sub
topics into his narrative of race relations – for example there is a fascinating
chapter on how improvements the technology of recording and transmitting music
for radio play in the 1940s affected race relations in the South.

In his short life, Redding produced hours of some of the finest
American music ever produced.Reading
this book with the power to stream that music is a truly great cultural
experience.